


String Theory at 1 A.M.

by Xparrot



Category: Smallville
Genre: Angst, Future Fic, Intoxication, M/M, Present Tense, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-03-07
Updated: 2007-03-07
Packaged: 2017-10-09 02:09:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/81831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xparrot/pseuds/Xparrot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Near-future-fic.</i> Lex has vision, a reason for everything, and a lot to drink.</p>
            </blockquote>





	String Theory at 1 A.M.

It is vaguely, slightly, minorly inestimably smally possible that Lex Luthor is plastered out of his mind.

He knows this because of the bitter dry aftertaste in his mouth, and the mitten-thick numbness of his hands, how clumsily disconnected they were when he reached for the bottle, and then the bottle was falling and then his hand was grabbing for it and then it smashed on the floor, but there wasn't a liquid splash, only the fracturing of dry glass. Empty. But the glass is full and unbroken, so he drinks from that until it's empty, too.

He knows this because of the way the floor tilts and the walls swoop up and down, and he was supposed to be standing up, but it's the room that moves instead, the world rotating around him while he is fixed in place, struggling to keep his gravity personal to himself so it doesn't roll the planet off its axis. It might, someday.

But mostly he knows this because the unimpaired human mind can hold seven items in its short-term working memory, and for most people these are seven digits or seven words but for Lex Luthor this means that he always, always has seven threads of thoughts in his mind at once. _This_ thread is the historical antecedents that lead to an experience, and _this_ thread is the rational scientific theory that accounts for it, and _this_ thread is the aesthetic principle that justifies it...seven threads winding and weaving into whole cloth in his mind, into comprehension, until he sees the big picture, the patterns that no one else can make out. He doesn't even have to squint to see it; it's always laid out before him, explaining things no one else even can guess. Lex doesn't have to guess; he always knows.

Alcohol cuts the threads, Atropos' scissors, for that merciful little while, and that's why he usually has a drink in hand, morning or night, so there's only six threads, or five threads, and he can see himself within the weaving, through the gaps, instead of just the tapestry, the fabric of his history and his destiny wound around himself.

He doesn't have a drink in his empty hand now, but he knows he's drunk because there's only one thread left in his mind, and it's not twisting anywhere, is just a single straight cord that draws him up, pulls the puppet of him standing on the rocking floor.

In wine there's truth; in brandy (his father's favorite) there's culture (his father's lessons); in vodka there's oblivion; but this was scotch, golden in the glass before he poured it down his throat, and in scotch there's distance. He used to favor brandy himself (like father, like son; like Luthor, like Luthor) but scotch has been his preferred poison for years now. With every swallow he's one step removed from himself, one step closer to where he needs to be, what he has to be.

But now he's taken so many steps that he's circled the world and come back and there's only himself waiting. Standing; swaying. One step, and he's being pulled, another step and he's being yanked stumbling along.

Only there's no cord in his bleary vision; there's nothing, and the tilting floor is safely barren of any obstacles, and he's walking across it. There's nothing pushing him; there's nothing behind him. He would remember if there were, but he remembers nothing. He knows he has a reason because he always has a reason, but he cut that line with the others.

The wind's cool on his hot flushed cheeks, on his bare scalp. He had slid open the glass door already, which was prudent of him, because he barely has the coordination to stand and couldn't have managed the latch at all. His feet are as numb and clumsy as his fingers and he trips on the raised threshold between the room and the balcony, the glass and walls and reflections wheeling around him as he falls, catches himself on his hands, leaving bloody smears along the polished pebbled stonework. The stinging of his scraped skin is very far away.

Metropolis is very far away, for all it's right in front of him, through the black vertical bars of the railing. A million lights spread out below, and the sky above is blank charcoal gray. It's the opposite of Smallville's night, where the sky was filled with stars and the cornfields were endless rustling darkness. There he had to look up to see the light; here he can look down on it. He loves Metropolis.

He may need more scotch. There was one bottle left on the table that he left inside but he should have brought it with him. He heals too fast from any assault and the severed threads are mending; they're tangled around him, two looping under and over him, not the single straight perfect line but knotted strings. This one is the past, spun out of Smallville's moonlit darkness; and that one is Metropolis, tied to these shining lights; and he's the shuttle trapped between their vibrating warp and weft, stuck in place, when he needs to move. Needs to do this now when he's before or beyond thinking it through.

He takes his hands and takes hold of the threads, pulls apart the knot tying him down. Wraps his stinging palms around the black cold metal bars of the railing and pulls himself up.

The vibration of these strings are notes, a chord sounding through him, and the song it sings is the answer to the alcohol. _This is why, this is why_. Because he does nothing unless there is a because, and it's here, and it's now. The wind blowing over his face is strong and chilly and dirty, tastes of asphalt and ash. Metropolis's galaxy blurs into a solid swathe of light as he leans out into space, swaying dizzily, overbalanced. His grip on the railing provides an axis and he tilts around it, tipping down over the edge. Swinging between two twisting threads, between the blank cornfield sky and the bright starfield city, between his past and his present and there is no future, because there's only two threads now.

Then he lets go.

The bars slip through his fingers, and the threads slip through his fingers, and he's falling. His gravity and the world's gravity draw together, and the stars are spinning around him, collapsing in, supernovas glowing brighter the closer he gets, and the wind is a long endless scream in his ears.

Then with a sickening lurch, everything stops. There's no gravity and the stars are motionless and the wind is silent like a vacuum and he can't even feel the cold, because the big arms around him are warm enough to block out the night.

He didn't have enough to drink, because there's this third cord wending through the other two, braiding them together. This is the thread that caught him, tugged him standing and tugged him over the railing; this is the thread that caught him, so he's hanging impossibly over Metropolis's streets, like a yoyo lost on the end of its string, not enough momentum to climb up again.

"Lex," Clark says.

"Superman," Lex says, "I knew you'd come," and he passes out.

* * *

When he wakes up he's sober enough to know he's still dead drunk, which is the worst of all possible worlds. Thoughts are whining in his head like mosquitoes, pizzicato-tight plucked strings vibrating.

"Drink this," Clark says, and puts a glass to his lips, but there's no burn; it's water. He shoves Clark aside, makes a lunge for the coffee table that upends his stomach and nearly dumps himself off the couch, but he's going to need more scotch, if Clark is still here.

Clark is here in blue and red and yellow, and if Lex is gauche enough to vomit he must remember to do it right on his chest, not only to cover the obnoxious symbol that was on t-shirts before the first week was out, but because chunks of olive green are just the finishing touch the ensemble needs.

"Last son of Krypton?" Lex asks, enunciating every syllable precisely.

"Lex," Clark says, painfully, but at least he moves out of the way and doesn't try to apologize.

The scotch is already open; the bottle clinks and rattles against the glass's rim as he tips and pours it with both unsteady hands, but he's done this enough thousands of times before to manage it even now and he's not going to drink fine whiskey from the bottle. Picks up the glass, lifts it to his mouth. This is his image. Not what he sees, spooled out endlessly before him; but what everyone else sees: slick billionaire magnate, infamous bald Lex Luthor, through their pinhole view of the world, their seven words that are single points instead of threads.

Clark, perhaps, sees something different again, not points and not the tapestry but lines, always lines that all must be parallel because they never intersect; his lines are only ever crossed, or not crossed so that you're penned between them. His father had taught him to see like that, Jonathan who was a farmer and thought in rows of crops and fences wending across his fields, his neighbors' fields. Mending fences, but he never wanted to be a good neighbor when the land was Lex's, never wanted a Luthor to be a neighbor at all.

This is the string that is attached to Smallville and is attached to his heart and will tug until it wrenches tears from him. He didn't cry at the funeral, those few years past, but he wasn't drunk at the funeral. Propriety towards the dead. Though perhaps offering no tears was a greater impropriety.

"Lex?"

If he's crying he can't taste it, but he might be, from the shaken unsure note in Clark's voice. "I'm drunk, you see," Lex explains.

"I noticed." There's a certain tone the sober get around the utterly wasted, the wry matter-of-fact superiority that comes of being in possession of one's faculties and knowing one is in control and you are not, gently humoring because reasoning is useless. Tempered more now because Clark assumes Lex is too far gone to remember any of this tomorrow. Clark doesn't know that Lex has never blacked out, not even on the wildest pharmaceutical cocktails in his teen years that should have killed him on at least four occasions, five if the roofies slipped to him in that London nightclub after the coke and the E count, which they don't because they weren't voluntary, and still he remembers every detail of that night, before and during and after the three of them left him for dead on the motel bed, limp and empty and utterly satisfied to be drained.

This is nothing; this loss of control is as controlled as any experiment must be, but Clark doesn't know, or his hand wouldn't be on Lex's back, stroking in slow undemanding circles as he sobs sobs he lost count of the reasons for, so can't calculate when he should stop.

When he is done crying Clark tries to ply him with the water again, and Lex refuses again. He doesn't get hangovers, either. Clark doesn't know that, either; Clark's seen him drink but has never seen him drunk, and what will he do? This is part of the plan, too. Really, the most entertaining part, because it's testing nothing, only indulging his curiosity. This last time, he can allow himself that indulgence.

There's very few things in his existence for which Lex has no hypothesis, no prediction, no calculated percentage of possibility. Clark has always been one of those things. He's how Lex knows what hope feels like: having no certainty, but only wishes, or dreams, or despair when hope is only one final fraying thread which can suspend not the weight of a single wish.

Superman is the opposite. Superman is one hundred percent certainty, absolute satisfaction guaranteed.

Until tonight, he was ninety-nine percent. That one percent of doubt was beautiful, and like all beautiful things Lex had to reach for it; and like all doubtful things Lex had to know.

He knows now, one hundred percent confirmation, and that's probably why he cried, more than the depressing reminders of funerals past.

"Why'd you do it?" Clark asks, still here, kneeling beside the couch with the bottom trail of his cape gathering in red puddles around his red boots. "Did you fall by accident, or were you..."

Superman is complete certainty but this, for now, is Clark. Superman will confidently ask any question but Clark will not always, and since it's Clark, Lex doesn't know when he won't. Clark is the Heisenberg Principle personified; Lex can know where Clark is, or he can know where Clark's going, but he cannot know the both at once. The closer Lex got to his secrets, the faster Clark moved away; and the more Lex tried to see his path, the less he understood why Clark walked it, and the greater the distance between them became.

Until Clark moved on so far ahead that he has circled the world (seven times in a second at the speed of light, and Superman can achieve that, or close enough to make no practical difference) and now he is here beside Lex again. And Lex is drunk, and knowing Clark is here, he cannot know what Clark will do. Clark could put his hands around Lex's neck and snap his spine in a painless fraction of a second; or he could bore two flaming holes through Lex's skull with the impossible heat of his eyes; or he could vanish in a blur and the zip-pop of displaced air; or he could lean down and kiss Lex on the mouth and bring him back to life again. Lex doesn't know, because this is Clark, and that's the beauty of it, that all he can do is wait and find out. One last time.

"Did you jump on purpose, Lex?" Clark asks finally, impatient with the waiting.

"Yes," Lex says, and Clark closes his eyes, rocks back on his heels.

"Why?" he asks, then shakes his head in negation; "Lex," he scolds, but shakes his head again; "You shouldn't," and when he opens his eyes all the cliches are showing in them, 'Don't do it' and 'Life is precious' and 'You have so much to live for' and he's a _superhero_ and after two weeks on the job he's already facing something he thinks he can't fix and Lex laughs.

"It wasn't a suicide attempt," Lex says. "Why would I try to kill myself? I'm drunk, not stupid." Temporary insanity; liquid psychosis.

Clark stares at him and his useless trite phrases spiral down the drain, leaving him gaping with nothing to say. "Well. That's...good."

Necessary lunacy. One percent of doubt; only the insane would be sure enough anyway to risk it. Madness crystallizes hope to faith. And that was why he set out the bottles on the tables and uncorked each of them and lined up and poured himself a row of full glasses; that was why he unlatched the balcony door and slid it open before he sat down on the couch and raised the first glass. _"To Superman,"_ and he had swallowed it in one go, burning all the way down.

"How long did it take you to get here?" Lex asks. That's one of the perils of inebriation; his time sense is invariably scrambled. He might have been falling for a second, or for an hour, by his distorted perception; though practically it couldn't have been longer than 14.8 seconds, and probably significantly less. There's cameras on the Towers' exterior, of course, and he'll time it exactly later, but he's curious now.

"I don't know. A few seconds," Clark says, distracted. "I was on patrol already. Lex, why—"

"I wouldn't have saved you," Lex states, trusting Clark to provide the necessary qualifications of 'if I had the powers, and you did not, and you were insane enough to jump'.

"Maybe you would have."

"No, I wouldn't have." It's true now, who he is now, and Clark already knew it; and that was the one percent of doubt in Superman's certainty. The only hope, the last he had. That thread was tied to Smallville, to his onetime friend and onetime mystery, a dozen close calls and a dozen fights, ninety-nine lies and one truth: _"If I'd have known who you were going to turn out to be, I never would have saved you."_

But all the mysteries are solved now, and the hypothesis is now disproved, and that onetime thread's snapped forever, loose end unraveling into nothing.

The new thread is twined red and blue and yellow, strong as steel, and it will be woven into every picture he ever sees again, will wind through every future. Lex will be able to count on it, even as he struggles to break it, to unstitch it. He'll always know, without a single doubt, where the hero is, and what he will do.

"Maybe not, but I'll still save you," Superman says, as if he hasn't already proven this to terrible, statistically significant satisfaction.

"You're the hero, Superman." One hundred percent; and Lex is the villain, or will be tomorrow.

Tonight he's just drunk, tangled in a snarl of pasts and presents and refuted possibilities. Tomorrow these knots will slip free and weave themselves back into the never-ending tapestry, and he'll work his schemes into the new pattern and twist it into one of his own making, beauty in the intricacy of his plans, aesthetic appeal in the warped design.

Tomorrow, when he wakes up, dry-mouthed but his head clear, he will be alone, laid out on the couch with a blanket thrown over him, with the lingering memory of a once-friend's voice telling him goodbye the moment before he opened his eyes. He will get up and go to work and two days after that, when a laboratory rival to LexCorp mysteriously burns down in a chemical accident (the sabotage will never be proven; one point six million in property damage, but no lives lost thanks to Metropolis's newest wonder), he will face Superman. One hundred percent the hero Superman, who will always stop him, and always save him, and there can be no despair when there is certainty, when there is no need for hope.

This is tomorrow. Tonight, Lex closes his eyes, and on the hazy black edge of unconsciousness feels warm lips brush his forehead, and for a little while longer he'll be drunk enough to make believe that this is still Clark here with him, and that he can't see what will happen next.


End file.
